At the time of Spider’s sixteenth birthday, in 1942, Tom did not get much help from him at lambing time, for the crowstarver was too busy at his first job. Mister was ploughing up larger and larger acreages of downland to grow more wheat and barley and oats for the War effort (and for his own profit – farmers have no objection to making money). Maggs’ Corner had been re-seeded to a three-year ley but Slimer’s was once again drilled with spring barley and the ‘croaks’ were as predatory as ever.
A cold wet spell in April meant that after each sortie against the robbers, Spider was glad to seek refuge in his house.
One day he had marched to the far end of Slimer’s, banging his old sheet of tin, blowing his whistle, and shouting ‘Ee-orr!’ and ‘Oo-ah! Oo-ah!’ Then he noticed a movement under the hedge at the top of the field and saw there a partridge with a brood of nine or ten little chicks. It was coming on to rain hard, and the mother bird was trying to shield her babies from the weather as it rapidly worsened. There was a sudden flash of lightning, followed almost immediately by a rumble of thunder, and then the heavens opened and the rain came down in great sheets.
For a moment Spider stood there, wondering what he could do for the hen partridge and her brood, and then, already soaked, he hurried back to the spinney and the shelter of his house. The storm continued for some while, as Spider sat on his wooden crate in his sodden clothes, Sis shivering beside him. He was as wet as if he had once more fallen in the Wylye, but when the rain relented, he saw the ‘croaks’ returning.
Anyone else would have left them to their devices and gone off to change into dry clothing, but Spider took up his duties again, drenched as he was.
By the time he reached home that evening he was shuddering with the cold and the wet, and Kathie hastened to put the old copper hip-bath in front of the fire and fill it with kettles full of hot water.
Next morning Spider had a nasty cough, and Kathie suspected on feeling his forehead, a temperature.
‘I’m not taking him to the doctor’s in this weather,’ she said to Tom, for it was still cold and very wet.‘The doctor will have to come here. You go down and see Percy,’ (the foreman had a telephone),‘and ask him will he ring up?’
When the doctor came he took Spider’s temperature and sounded his narrow chest. He spent some little time listening through his stethoscope.
‘He’s got a chill, Mrs Sparrow,’ he said.‘Keep him in bed. I’ll leave you some medicines, and I’ll look in tomorrow.’
Standing, poking the fire that evening, Kathie suddenly said to her husband, ‘What’s to become of him, Tom?’
‘Don’t fret, Kath love,’ Tom said. ‘It’s nothing much, he’ll soon be better.’
‘No, I mean what’s to become of him when we’re gone?’
‘Dead, you mean?’
‘Yes. How will he ever manage on his own?’
Tom got out of his chair and put his arms round his wife. ‘Come on now, love,’ he said. ‘We’re not that old!’
Tom was at home when the doctor next came and again listened carefully to Spider’s chest. Then he said, ‘Goodbye, John Joseph,’ (at which Spider looked completely blank) and went downstairs.
‘I don’t think you’ve a lot to worry about,’ he said to Tom and Kathie. ‘Like I said, it’s just a chill.’
‘He’s not coughing so much today, doctor,’ said Kathie.
‘Good. His temperature’s down a bit.’
‘He’s never been ill in his life before,’ Tom said. ‘Bit short of breath sometimes, but never what you’d call ill.’
‘Is that so?’ said the doctor. He had not been long in the district and had not met the Sparrows before, though he had of course at once realized that Spider was mentally subnormal. He was a young man but yet an old-fashioned sort of a doctor, who believed among other things that it was always best to call a spade a spade, and so fought shy of sugaring his pills. He also thought that it was the job of the head of any household to take what knocks might threaten his family. Had he been a ship’s doctor, he would expect every man, in the face of disaster, to cry,‘Women and children first!’
Accordingly now, having said his goodbyes to Kathie along with certain admonishments as to Spider’s treatment, he lured Tom to walk out with him by admiring the beauty of the cabbages in his garden.
Then, when they reached his car, the doctor said, ‘I think it best that you should know, Mr Sparrow, that your boy has a slight heart problem. I didn’t want to worry your wife with it, but I have to tell you that he has what we call a heart murmur. I could hear it quite plainly through my stethoscope, it’s an abnormal rustling sound, quite unmistakable.’
‘Dear God!’ said Tom. ‘He’s abnormal enough as ’tis, poor lad.’
‘It may be nothing to concern yourself about,’ said the doctor, ‘but I thought it right to tell you. If he should show any symptoms of heart trouble in the future, we can have a much more thorough look at him. I shouldn’t worry your wife about it.’
‘What was he on about?’ asked Kathie when the doctor had driven away.
‘Oh, just chatting,’ said Tom.
Thus it was that the shepherd, who had saved the life of the infant Spider sixteen years earlier, was now the only one to know that that life might possibly be threatened.
Spider did not know of course, nor Kathie, nor Mister and his wife, nor Percy nor any of those who worked on Outoverdown Farm. Only Tom knew and only Tom worried, and even he, as haymaking passed and harvest time came and went, and Spider appeared in every way his usual self, began to be less concerned. Some days he never even thought about it.
It was a wonderful summer for Spider. Early on, at the end of May, he stumbled upon a litter of fox cubs. There was an earth, part hidden by a stunted sentinel thorn bush, in one of the banks of the lynchets, and one day Spider saw from a distance the cubs come out to play.
From then on he would go to see them whenever he could, gradually approaching nearer. Often the vixen scented and saw the silent watcher, but seemed not to mind.
Spider would leave Sis at home on these occasions, telling her (in front of Kathie, so that she too would understand), ‘Spider go see baby voxes.’ Then he would walk up to the lynchets and sit and look down at the cubs, their coats still woolly and grey-brown, their tails small and pointed, playing tag, mock-fighting, scratching their fleas, and occasionally looking, bright-eyed and fearless, up at him.
There were ‘hotters’ to watch too. The bitch in the willow-tree holt had given birth to three cubs in the spring, and Spider quite often saw the four of them – the dog otter, as was usual, had gone away elsewhere – in the daytime. Most otters sleep the day away inside their holts, but this family seemed to come out on purpose to greet Spider.
One evening he saw, in the spinney, an animal he’d never before set eyes on. It was a thickset bear-like animal, that walked with a slow rolling shuffle, head and tail low. When it saw Spider, it did not flee but stood and stared at him, and then made a clucking sound of pleasure before passing him unconcernedly by. Spider soon found its picture in his old book, and Kathie told him its name.
‘Budger!’ said Spider, smiling, and he clucked at her.
Earlier in the year, a pair of house-martins had built their nest, a half-cup made of mud, under the cottage eaves; it was but a few feet from his bedroom window, and once the eggs were hatched, he could lean out and look up and watch the parents bringing insects for the four hatchlings, both birds in no way disturbed by his nearness.
All creatures allowed him near – ‘barrits’,‘big barrits’, partridges, pigeon – any and every animal he met. It was as though all the wild life of Outoverdown Farm wanted to make the summer of 1942 a very special one for Spider Sparrow.
It was not only the wild animals that gave him pleasure of course. There were the cattle and sheep, always glad to have him move among them, and Flower and his other friends in the carthorse stable, and, especially perhaps, the six once-wild broncos.
These were now fit to be sold as riding horses, said Mister, and he had every intention of selling them, he told his wife. But somehow the months passed and still the four pintos, the sorrel and the buckskin continued to enjoy their freedom on the downs, and, when possible, the company of Spider.
So summer prepared to give way to autumn, and Tom had almost completely forgotten the doctor’s visit and his words of warning. Then came one peerless day in late September, a Sunday it was, when the sun still shone warmly from an almost cloudless blue sky, and the breeze was gentle, and the Wylye Valley at its most beautiful. It was a day when, here on the wide Wiltshire downs, it did not seem possible to believe in the War with its daily bulletin of death.
That afternoon Spider made it plain that he was going for a walk.
‘Not too far mind,’ said Kath, ‘and you be back in good time for your tea. I got a nice piece of meat for you and your father.’
‘What time, Mum?’ asked Spider, turning his wrist to look at the watch they had bought him for his sixteenth birthday present. It was a cheap one, they couldn’t afford better, but it kept good time, which Spider had learned to tell, after a fashion. He knew what it meant when the long hand pointed straight up, and Tom had taught him to count round the dial to tell what hour it was.
Now he said,‘I got a sick ewe up in the yard as I want to take a look at later. You meet me there, Spider, and we’ll walk home together. You be there, at my hut, five o’clock, all right?’ and he held up four fingers and a thumb.
They watched him set off up the road with that distinctive walk, his watch on his wrist, his whistle round his neck, his knife in his pocket, his dog at heel.
‘He’s happy, our boy, isn’t he, Tom,’ Kathie said. It was a statement, not a question.
‘Long may he be so,’ said Tom.
When five o’clock came, Tom was in the shepherd’s hut doing some odd jobs while he waited for his son, but time passed without sight of him. Tom went outside the yard and looked around the fields but could not see him coming. He misunderstood, he thought, he’ll have made his own way home. But then he heard in the distance the noise of a dog howling. It seemed to be coming from the direction of the spinney. ‘Come, Moss,’ said Tom, and he set off across the grass ground that led to both Maggs’ Corner and Slimer’s.
That’s got to be Sis howling, he thought. Why? What’s happened? He quickened his steps towards the spinney. Now he could see that its greenness was stippled with black, for in every ash tree there sat crows and rooks and jackdaws, still and silent.
‘Spider!’ called Tom, and at the sound of his voice the howling stopped, and the birds rose in a great flock.
Sis was sitting outside Spider’s house. She ran to him as he approached and then ran back again. Tom followed, running too now.
‘Spider?’ he said again as he reached the overgrown shelter, but there was no answer. Tom bent to look inside.
Spider was sitting on the wooden crate, his back against the hurdle wall, his long arms hanging by his side. His eyes were closed. He looked to be fast asleep.
Tom took hold of Spider’s hand. It was cold. He felt for a pulse. There was no pulse. That heart, that murmuring heart, was still. Now the shepherd carried the boy slung across his shoulders, as he would have carried a dead ewe, back over the grass field to the yard, the two dogs following.
High above them, the croaks, silent still, caprioled and curvetted in the sky, an aerial ballet bidding a final farewell to the crowstarver.
Tom opened the door of the shepherd’s hut, so close to which he had first set eyes on the foundling, and laid Spider gently on the rough wooden bunk. Moss sat silent, but Sis crept forward, whining softly, and licked at one cold hanging hand.
‘It’s all right, girl,’ Tom said softly. ‘We’ll look after you.’ He stood looking down upon the face of this, his only son. It wore its customary lopsided smile.
‘He’s happy,’ said Tom to the watching dogs. ‘Thank God, he’s happy.’